Category: Communities

Stone Soup as a key to successful communities of practice The story of Stone Soup is one that exists in many cultures, and it’s one that I learned as a child. This story, I believe, speaks to the core principles of running an effective volunteer project—including successful communities. A long time ago, a kind traveler came upon a poor village filled with many unhappy people. The traveler smiled and asked why they were so unhappy. The villagers told him it was because there was no food to eat and they…

Connect community members who can solve the problems or address the needs. Once a community knows what the big problems are and have rank-ordered them, they can begin dealing with the items of greatest value to the community. For cross-corporate communities, good facilitators connect existing and potential community members from all over the world—across those corporate boundaries, geographic boundaries, time zone boundaries and so on—who are passionate about solving the problem and bring them together virtually. They decentralize authority. They enable the success of community members by providing important resources such as…

Understanding members’ problems, needs, and goals is essentially to facilitating a thriving community. Building a successful, thriving community—whether it be an Enterprise Transition Community, community of practice or temporary, project-focused community—requires understanding the problems, needs and goals of the community members. For example, when we started the IBM Scrum Community, we asked team members, “What is the greatest challenge you’re experiencing in relation to embracing Scrum?” The top answer was that community members were having difficulty using Scrum as distributed teams. Most teams had members located in different cities, countries and…

Communities can be a powerful asset for change Communities, given support, nurturing and social technology, can become a center of powerful influence that creates connections and enables continuous improvement within the enterprise through armies of volunteers. Large-scale enterprises have diverse talent and skills to tap One of the most exciting and powerful aspects of being part of a large-scale enterprise is having access to diverse talent and skills throughout the company. Within those enterprises that have invested in a good corporate-wide directory service with reasonable search functionality, finding subject matter experts…